Label:
Jonathan Cape
Release Date:
01/04/2003

With the release of every graphic biography come the
inevitable comparisons to Art Spiegelman’s seminal Maus, a
sequential-art rendition of his parents’ survival of Jewish persecution by the
Nazis during World War II. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
is one of the few graphic memoirs worthy of this comparison.

In simple,
innocent lines and black and white contrast, Satrapi retells the story of her
life in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. The purity of her drawings maximizes
the impact of her message by softening the full horror of her story. The
execution of family, the bombing of neighbors, the hypocrisy of recent converts
to Islam, the harassment suffered for the most innocuous Western practices, the
continued frustration and chaos of Iran’s political state overtaken by
Fundamentalism eventually push Satrapi’s parents to ship her off to Vienna at
age 14. Satrapi conveys the fear and frustration of her coming-of-age, contrasting the enlightenment of her parents' political views with the compromising they must do in order to survive.

It takes a delicate hand to tell such a loaded story.
Satrapi’s Perespolis manages to educate and illuminate without lapsing
into rhetoric or sentimentality.